Intuit Quicken Essentials for Mac Review

"Essential" is the new "lite"--and it bites

A new entry in Intuit’s venerable line of financial software, Quicken Essentials is all about keeping track of your cash. Load it with your bank accounts, credit cards, assets, and loans, and it’ll show you where the money is going.

If you’re migrating from Microsoft Money or a previous version of Quicken, your first stop should be the conversion tool. This is actually a separate application that launches to perform the file translation. Ooh-kay. We threw a 3.6MB Quicken 2007 data file with about 3,300 transactions at the converter. After creating and saving a new file, the conversion tool required us to locate that file in the Finder and drag it back into the converter. We’re at a loss to explain why, in a product touted for its simplicity, we needed to drag a file into the application that just created it. Quirks aside, Essentials did convert and load the old data without error.

Editing transactions is a simple affair, and adding tags should be instantly familiar to iPhoto users.

Rather than being an update to Quicken Mac 2007, Quicken Essentials is an entirely new product. Intuit has drawn heavily from Apple’s current interface design principles--Essentials uses the now common split-window design popularized by iTunes. While accounts and transactions can be entered manually, Quicken Essentials was built for downloading. When you add a new account, the first step is selecting your financial institution from a list of hundreds. All the big banks are present, but we easily found our small local bank among the choices. After we entered our login credentials, Essentials was able to connect to the bank, create records for each of our accounts, and download transactions. If your bank isn’t listed or you don’t want to store your account passwords inside the application, Essentials can import manually downloaded Quicken Web Connect files. Like the Quicken products that came before, transactions must be categorized, but Essentials adds a Tags section to add data to each transaction.

Unfortunately, Essentials omits many key features that were present in the previous iteration of Quicken for Mac. Investment tracking has been cut back, and bill pay, check printing, and Turbo Tax export features have all been jettisoned. Then there’s the documentation, which consists of a shallow “getting started” guide. Rather than being given a full manual to fill in the gaps, users are sent to the Live Community, a web forum where they can “get answers from other Quicken Essentials users and experts.” The handful of Intuit employees we found posting answers were undermined by the disclaimer: “Intuit does not guarantee the accuracy of the Live Community postings.” Sigh.

Reporting was another disappointment. Essentials offers two monthly summary reports, one each for the current and previous month, and they can’t be customized. The Category Report is useful--it can be filtered by date, account, categories, and tags, displaying the results in three levels of detail. Once you’ve set up the filters just how you want them, you can save it as a custom report. The third report variety is the Spending Cloud, which shows your transactions in a weighted tag cloud--it looks interesting, but that’s deceiving, and its utility is limited at best.

Essentials is essentially bare bones--many useful features are missing. It might score higher if it were a $19 download, but for 50 bucks, we want documentation and support, not a public forum where you may or may not get help.